Roger Sherman, signer of Declaration, died at 72, July 23, 1793

On this day in 1793, Roger Sherman, one of the five committee members who drafted the Declaration of Independence, died at age 72 after a two-month bout with typhoid fever, a bacterial disease spread by lice and fleas. He is buried near the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn., where he served as a professor of religion, treasurer of the college and mayor of the city.

At the time of his death, Sherman was a member of the U.S. Senate. Of those who inspired the American Revolution, Sherman was the only one to have signed all four major state papers of the new nation: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson once introduced him as “a man who never said a foolish thing in his life.”

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Sherman saw that the Articles of Confederation were incapable of providing an effective government. They made no provision for a president, executive agencies, a judiciary or a tax base from which to pay the armed forces.

In Philadelphia, Sherman played a leading role during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, convened to amend the articles. He advanced a plan that broke a logjam between the large and small states. It called for all citizens to be represented proportionally in one branch of the legislature, to be known as the House of Representatives, or the lower chamber. At the same time, each state would be represented in the Senate, or the upper chamber, where they would be granted two seats apiece, no matter what their size.

Connecticut entered the deliberations as a middle-sized state, smaller than Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania but larger than Delaware or Rhode Island. Accordingly, the delegates, in adopting Sherman’s proposal, dubbed it the Great Compromise or the Connecticut Compromise.